A bunch of bananas to ITV News anchor Mark Austin for balancing levity with dignity when hosting the 2011 Royal Television Society journalism awards on Wednesday, the day his friend and colleague Marie Colvin died. After a heartfelt tribute to Colvin, he said she told him she joked she was not really blind, but just wore her eye patch to switch it from one eye to another to see if people noticed. He also managed to lift the audience with a few quips. Following camera operator Stuart Webb's harrowing account of filming a young boy dying and having to watch it again and again during an edit, Mark drew a deep breath and to laughs from the audience said: "It's a cheerful old night isn't it?" And after the attractive al-Jazeera English team won news channel of the year for the first time and gave a short acceptance speech, Austin deadpanned: "Gosh, they should win more often." Austin told Monkey afterwards he had changed his speech at the last minute, removing some jokes about Sky News. On a night when BBC News loudly cheered its triumphs after it was roundly thumped by ITV and ITN last year, Mark quipped: "I also wanted to put in a joke about how with it being Lent, ITV was giving up winning awards this year." Ba-dum tish!

My stylish friend

Marie Colvin's great friend, Baroness Bonham Carter, the Liberal Democrat peer, a former television journalist, recalled at the RTS awards how the Sunday Times war correspondent had spent last Christmas with her family. "The important thing was that she was a real journalist. I don't actually believe she is dead. She was stylish, she dressed wonderfully, she loved a party," Bonham Carter told Monkey. "The last text I had from her said, 'I'm in Beirut, I'm trying to get into Homs …' Unfortunately, she was too brave."

Reading between the lines

Awards chairman Richard Sambrook drew laughs with a slip of the tongue when he was thanking the supplier of the autocue system, saying he would like to thank them for the "autocoke". A good line, but one he would probably like to chop out. Monkey reckons Richard probably wished he had had a teleprompter himself.